I don't watch a lot of TV shows, but when I do, I binge them. One of the weekends a couple months ago I did nothing but sat in the couch and finished the only season of "Altered Carbon", partly to procrastinate doing my taxes. I was going to write about it then, but death and taxes got in the way.

Altered Carbon is set in a future where all your memory is instantly recorded in an electronic implant, and your memory can be restored into any body as long as the implant is not damaged. There's a side effect every time you switch body though, doing it too often and your mind gets damaged. The super rich make nightly backup of their implants and clone their bodies so they can essentially live forever.

A lot of the show is about the implications of "forever". As a side effect of the mind living forever, bodies are disposable, except for the religious few who believe lives are meant to end. Those who truly live forever have God-like status, and because they never die, wealth and power is not concentrated in families but in individuals. Ever complained about your parents still treat 30 year-olds like kids? That's nothing compared to 250 year-olds treating 200 year-olds like kids. Wedding vows are short and sweet but keeping them truly takes forever.

While I procrastinated with my taxes I also came across another Korean movie, The Beauty Inside. The main character, Woo-jin, wakes up with a different body every day. He lives by himself and nobody knows about his secret except his mom and his best friend. To everyone else, he's always a stranger. Instead of forever, everything in his life is transient.

In additional to having 100 different pairs of glasses and all the sizes of shoes, Woo-jin also has to live with other life inconveniences like not being able to speak Korean if he wakes up as a foreigner or the awkwardness of his best friend asking to have sex with "him" on the days he's a woman. Being a Korean movie, obviously the main obstacle Woo-jin faces is finding a girlfriend. Vernon Elliot still loves his wife when she re-sleeves into a man's body, but Woo-jin lives outside of the dystopian world of Altered Carbon where that is the norm.

The rebels in Altered Carbon lives in a world of forevers and fights for a world where everyone eventually dies. In Woo-jin's world everything lasts for only one day but he longs for forever. In both worlds the characters are not defined by their bodies but by their minds. If we are what we speak and anchoring are true to some extent, are we really only our souls or are there more to our non-disposable shells?

(Old post from elsewhere)

Recently discovered Amazon prime video's selection of Asian movies. Sad Movie, a Korean movie that I randomly saw when I was visiting Hong Kong in 2006, is also on there so I re-watched it. The movie contains 4 mostly independent love stories: a workaholic mom and her son, a firefighter and his girlfriend, a costume mascot and an artist who worked in the same park, an unemployed guy who started an unconventional business in order to keep his girlfriend.

The main characters in those (sad, duh) stories all had trouble expressing their love for different reasons, and in the end they had to communicate their feelings through non-verbal means. That's very Asian, in the sense that stereotypically we are more shy about telling others how we feel.

Compare that with Cyrano Agency. The name is a reference to Cyrano de Bergerac, but I like to think of it as a Korean version of Hitch instead. Unlike Hitch, which put a lot of emphasis on actions, staffs from Cyrano Agency gave their customers carefully scripted dialogs to woo their prospective girlfriends. The customers were to follow the scripts exactly, and wore spy equipment so that they can be given immediate feedback or the next line in case they forgot what they needed to say.

As in Sad Movie, the suitors were portrayed as bad with words and had troubles expressing their feelings. And yet, through the help of the Cyrano agents they were able to deliver the perfect punchlines and ultimately win the hearts of those they were pursuing. In both movies, characters' desire of genuine exchanges is not diminished by their lack of abilities to give them.

There are a few lines from Soo-jung (firefighter's girlfriend) that I thought summed up this aspect of both movies quite well. I wanted to write something about what she said right after the words appeared on the screen, so I think it's good to end this with those lines:

"I keep doing sign language, so I forget how to speak. I remember how to say it with my hands, but not with words. It stays at the top of my tongue. But there are words that even if I remember, I can't say. Maybe I just wanted to hear it from you first."